If you were trying to be funny, as indicated by the inclusion of , you missed by a mile.

You did, however, nail creepifying and inappropriate. Would you have said "maybe she died in a fire", "maybe she drove off a bridge", "maybe she was consumed by flesh eating bacteria"?

Not cool, especially since we've had well respected and liked posters stop posting who have actually passed away suddenly. Please don't make such comments in the future, any comments can go to PM so as not to derail the thread any further.

^ I thought Mitt just changed his position on which direction text should be facing from day to day.

If any of you guys keep in touch with Miss Chicken on Facebook, or via email or IM, can you send her well-wishes and let her know that she's missed around here? I think that would be the most helpful thing to do in this situation.

As for Dream's comment: I think we should give him/her the benefit of the doubt. Remember that not everyone here is a native speaker of English and a literal translation of a foreign phrase might at times turn out a bit bewildering.
For example, 'killing two birds with one stone' would in my country be understood only in the most literal sense and be severely frowned upon as an unthinkable cruelty to animals. In Germany, you instead 'hit two flies with one swatter', an expression which native speakers of English wouldn't recognize as proverbial but rather take literally.

Maybe the sleeping with fishes comment was another of these examples.
Or "the Fishes" is someone's nickname or username (not here, though - I checked), or it refers to some people named "Fish" or we are to take it most literally: she is on a vacation, drifts in a lake or in the sea, enjoying the water and dozing while being surrounded by fishies.

So, before we criticise Dream, we should first try to secure the facts instead of jumping to the worst possible conclusion, based on insufficient data.

As for Dream's comment: I think we should give him/her the benefit of the doubt. Remember that not everyone here is a native speaker of English and a literal translation of a foreign phrase might at times turn out a bit bewildering.

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I checked some of his posts for heck of it. He sounds like a native English speaker, and probably an American.

Maybe the sleeping with fishes comment was another of these examples.
Or "the Fishes" is someone's nickname or username (not here, though - I checked), or it refers to some people named "Fish" or we are to take it most literally: she is on a vacation, drifts in a lake or in the sea, enjoying the water and dozing while being surrounded by fishies.

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I am very amused that someone could be speculating that Miss Chicken is sleeping with The Fishes

I suggest that if she has taken a lover during her board absence she should encourage him/her to join and grab that user name.

If any of you guys keep in touch with Miss Chicken on Facebook, or via email or IM, can you send her well-wishes and let her know that she's missed around here? I think that would be the most helpful thing to do in this situation.

For example, 'killing two birds with one stone' would in my country be understood only in the most literal sense and be severely frowned upon as an unthinkable cruelty to animals. In Germany, you instead 'hit two flies with one swatter', an expression which native speakers of English wouldn't recognize as proverbial but rather take literally.

In Germany, you instead 'hit two flies with one swatter', an expression which native speakers of English wouldn't recognize as proverbial but rather take literally.

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I completely disagree. While there are indeed many proverbial idioms that don't translate well, that's certainly not one of them.

The two-for-one deal being mentioned makes the analogy with "kill two birds with one stone" glaringly obvious. I'm sure most English speakers would have no trouble picking up the meaning of it in context, recognizing that the speaker was foreign, and that the phrase is probably the analog of the English version in whatever country he or she is from. It might even elicit a giggle or two.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure most people would be able to understand the 'hitting two birds with one stone' thing here, too. And even if they didn't I doubt that they'd think the person saying it was about to kill birds. There is such a thing as context and generally people do understand that an idiom is being used even if they don't understand its (exact) meaning.

That's an excellent example! Thank you!
As it lacks the 2 vs 1 component, it'd be impossible to recognize for a native speaker of English as similar to the birds/stone phrase. And I suppose Grimm's tales aren't that well known in the US though I recall having seen an abridged volume in a LA bookstore. (Interestingly, they edited quite a few endings, like the evil witch in Hänsel & Gretel not getting shoved into the oven and burnt to death.)

I respectfully disagree. It is not always that easy to recognize the origin of a poster. I myself have been mistaken for a native speaker on this very board more than once. I was even thratened with a ban, under the (false) assumption that I was a well-known Anglo-Canadian troll's dual.
As a general rule, you can recognize foreigners by their better command of grammar and spelling (no offense meant, just pointing out an - admittedly somewhat embarrassing - fact)

He's [...] given quite a posting history of unpleasent comments and behaviour towards women, so...

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At a board I used to frequent we had a good way of dealing with that sort of guy. It was a game of sorts, called "hug the troll". We'd follow the victim everywhere, be absolutely annoyingly friendly and spam the person with hugs until they were so disgusted they left in a hurry. It worked infallibly.